


Circumnavigation

by eulersidentitycrisis



Series: Beth Harmon, World Traveler [2]
Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, as it turns out maybe i am less of the hard hearted cynic than i think i am, beth finds herself eat/pray/love style, ended up way sappier than I expected, or more like eat/do not pray/love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:48:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28970121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eulersidentitycrisis/pseuds/eulersidentitycrisis
Summary: Beth visits a number of places she's never been to, and a couple she has.
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts, Beth Harmon/Vasily Borgov (Past)
Series: Beth Harmon, World Traveler [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2124885
Comments: 48
Kudos: 71





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This follows after The War Years, but can be read separately under the assumption that Beth stayed in Moscow for a few days after the tournament, and she and Borgov briefly became lovers before parting amicably.
> 
> I realized about 1,000 words in that this first chapter is more or less a product of pandemic-induced wanderlust. I should note that I have been to some but not all of the places in this chapter, and some of those I have been to it was quite a while ago (and all of those I have been to it was in the 21st century, not the 1960s), so apologies in advance for any geographic or temporal inconsistencies.
> 
> Finally, thanks as always to Tanya, for her advice, ability to keep me honest about actually finishing pieces I start, and for always making the time to help and edit, despite her own busy life.

_Bangkok, Thailand_

Not even in New York can Beth remember being surrounded by so many people. She feels thrillingly off kilter, in a place where no one knows her name, or face, or past. In Russia, she’d spoken the language, more or less. In Paris and Mexico, she’s dabbled a bit, and anyway the words and the world held a sort of vague familiarity. 

But here, everything is breathtakingly new. At first, when her finger had fallen in her atlas on Thailand (well, in complete honesty, somewhere in SouthEast Asia, and she had figured Thailand was a safer plan than Vietnam) she’d felt nervous at the idea of being somewhere so divergent from everywhere she’d been before. But, she told herself, that was the whole point of this plan. 

She doesn’t have anyone like Vasily here, of course, who will serve as her guide and provide the city’s native perspective. But while she wants to do all the touristy things, she wants to find a way to dig her fingers into the skin of the city itself, to do things no guidebook writer would know to do, to drink deeply from the well until she is sated.

There’s a restlessness, under her skin. It’s always been there, she knows, but her time in Moscow has brought it to the forefront, and allowed her to see it as not a curse, but something to explore. And thus, her plan - she will crawl across the world until she gets tired of rootlessness, or forever, whichever comes first.

And thus, after a day of exploring shopping malls and city streets, after admiring the (so her guidebook calls them) spirit houses that pop up throughout the city and along the river, after running off a scammer who tries to tell her he can get her the lowest price on gemstones (“Just for her!”), after haggling in street stalls (negotiation, she learns, is a bit like chess, though the former comes much less naturally to her), and buying pretty dresses for a fraction of what she’d pay in the States, and making conversation with any locals that she’s fortunate enough to run into that speak a language she does and will talk to her, after all that she finds herself in the middle of a night market that’s been recommended to her, not having eaten, trying to determine something that is a suitable combination of adventurous and likely to be enjoyable. 

She walks past frog eggs, and sticky rice in every color under the sun, and noodle dishes with shrimp, and decides that she’s a grown adult, and can have dessert for dinner if she likes, and orders the peanut ice cream. It’s odd - more savory than she would have expected (though she wasn’t daring enough to order the bean-based ice cream), but she enjoys it nonetheless. She buys a selection of small cookies that look like they could be similar to shortbread, but end up tasting surprisingly (and unpleasantly) reminiscent of fish. 

An older man in the market notices her displeasure, and smiles. “Westerners don’t usually like them,” he says.

“Is it supposed to taste like fish?” she asks.

He laughs. “Why, do you not like fish?”

“No, I love it! Just usually not in dessert.”

“Ah, if you like fish, then, you should have it in non-dessert form. Try that place over there.”

She follows where he’s pointing and thanks him, and as it turns out, the fish balls the stand sells are dripping in grease and yet incredibly, melt in the mouth delicious.

It’s all overwhelming and yet delightful, and everything is so _new, new, new,_ so exciting and so worth living for, she finds herself all but skipping to the roadside to hail a _tuk tuk_ (after all, she never claimed to be _immune_ from touristy practices), which takes her to her temporary homebase. 

Forswearing, at least temporarily, five star hotels with all the comfort (and all the lack of adventure) of home, she crashes into her bed in the youth hostel she’s staying at, and notices a bleary eyed woman tugging a suitcase onto the bed across from her.

It’s dark, and most of the other people in the room are asleep, but the woman extends a hand to her. “Hi,” she says, slightly awkwardly. “I’m Mackenzie. Like, uh, like the Canadian Prime Minister.”

She shakes the proffered hand. “Beth. Are you Canadian then?”

“Yeah, you’re American, no?”

She nods, and then can’t help a yawn.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you up!” Mackenzie says. “I’ll let you get to sleep, though hopefully I won’t keep you awake, I’ve been told I snore.”

“No worries,” says Beth. “Sleeping in rooms full of beds of people isn’t exactly a new thing for me.”

* * *

Admitting to herself that she is, in fact, a tourist, Beth decides to visit one of the temples her guidebook talks about - The Temple of the Emerald Buddha. The architecture is stunning, and she’s in awe of the painstaking work that must have gone into the mosaics and intense detail on the buildings. 

Eventually, after exploring the grounds, she comes to the building where the actual Emerald Buddha is housed. She toes off her shoes where everyone else has left theirs near the entrance, hoping she’ll be able to find them when she gets back, and thinking to herself that it probably would have been wiser to wear socks, rather than just her ballet flats. She sits herself on the floor in quiet reflection like so many others in the room, her feet carefully pointed towards the door. 

She cannot say she experiences anything magical or transformative. But after the hustle and bustle of the day before, of trying to drink from the firehose of life, it’s nice to take a moment and just allow herself to breathe deeply, and let the atmosphere around her slowly permeate her mind. 

When she feels ready, she tiptoes out of the room, hunts for her shoes a bit, slips them on, and returns to wandering the grounds. She winds up at a gift shop ( _Okay, Okay,_ she thinks. _Perhaps I’m failing a bit at this whole “not being a tourist” thing_ ), and finds herself staring at the rack of post cards. 

She grabs two fairly generic postcards, and a pack of stamps. One is for Jolene (who, aside from a brief call to let her know she’d wired the money while still in Moscow, she guiltily recalls that she’s barely spoken to since winning the tournament), and she pretends to herself that she doesn’t know who the other one is for.

She briefly contemplates buying a third, but stops such thoughts before they can progress. She doesn’t even know his address, for one thing, and for another she’s certain that such a missive would be read by any number of eyes other than its intended recipient. And besides, there were any number of good reasons why she left Moscow in the first place.

So she heads to the register with her two postcards and stamps, grabbing a cheap plastic pen on the way, and then makes tracks back to the hostel. 

She sits on the bed, where she scribbles a letter to Jolene, crammed into as tiny text as she can fit on the back of the postcard, complete with everything that’s happened in Thailand, and an edited version of her time in Moscow.

For the other postcard, she has no need to give herself hand cramps writing as small as possible. To Benny, she writes only “You said I couldn’t call, but you never said I couldn’t write.” She doesn’t particularly think she needs to sign it.

* * *

Her fourth or fifth day in Bangkok, she’s sitting on her bed after a canal boat ride, trying not to reflect on the fact that her postcard to Benny is more or less the coward’s way out ( _Sure, he’d said not to call, but then he’d called_ her).

She looks up to notice that Mackenzie is packing her things. Beth has made pleasant conversation with her when their time in the hostel has overlapped, and she’s learned she’s studying history in Toronto, and that this summer trip is her reward for getting through her second year. 

When she’d asked Beth what she did, Beth briefly considered replying “playing games,” which she thought Benny (and certainly Harry) would appreciate, but she’d restrained herself and gone with saying she was between jobs, which was basically true. She was between tournaments, after all, and for her it was basically the same thing.

“Where are you headed?” Beth asks.

“Cairo,” says Mackenzie. “I don’t think I ever grew out of my fascination with mummies, growing up.” Silence falls for a second, then Mackenzie asks, “How much longer are you staying here for?”

“Not sure,” Beth replies. “It’s not as though I’m on a deadline.”

“Have you ever been to Cairo?”

“No,” answers Beth slowly.

“Would you want to?”

A smile creeps across Beth’s face.

* * *

_Cairo, Egypt_

Beth and Mackenzie are staying at the same hostel again, but aside from visiting a couple museums together, they’ve mostly gone off on their own. Mackenzie’s most interested in packing in as much history-studying as she can in her visit, and while Beth appreciates a good museum and historical site or two, she also just wants to explore the city and shops.

Which is how Beth finds herself in a cafe, drinking painfully strong coffee, writing a postcard to Jolene in handwriting so small an ant would need a magnifying glass to read it, and trying to pretend to herself the length of the postcard note is due to something other than procrastination on figuring out what to write on the other postcard she bought.

Fortunately for her, right as she’s signing the postcard to Jolene, another procrastination opportunity presents itself, in the form of one of the two men at the table next to her pulling out a chess set.

She knows blatant people watching is rude, but she hasn’t even played against herself since she left Moscow, which she figures is probably the longest she’s gone without playing since she was first adopted (plus, after all, it’s a way to avoid the other postcard). 

They’re clearly regulars at the cafe - the waitress brings them their orders without asking, and they both make conversation with her in Arabic, the darker-skinned one on the right with the ease of a native speaker, the light skinned one on the left with less practice, though the waitress responds to his slightly halted speech with an indulgent, almost fond, smile. The two men speak to each other in English though, both with a British accent.

They’re decent players, for sure. Not like she would encounter on the world stage of course, but they would certainly be able to stand up for themselves at a state-level tournament. They’re quite evenly matched, and it’s a close-fought game, but ultimately the man on the left edges it out, after a game of slow annihilation that leaves him with a rook and a knight, and his opponent only with pawns. 

The darker-skinned man holds his hands up in surrender. “Well played, Everitt,” he says. “I’d offer you the customary winnings, but I think I ought to just take it out of the amount you owe me.”

“Fair enough,” the one who is apparently Everitt replies. “Knew I’d snap your streak one of these days.” He then seems to notice Beth watching them. “Do you play?” he asks.

She nods. “Yeah, I do.”

“Oh, American,” he says, picking up on her accent. He leans over to her table, holding out his hand to shake, “Jacob Everitt, but everyone calls me Everitt.”

“Nice to meet you, Everitt” she replies. “I’m Beth.”

The other man shakes her hand as well, with significantly more refinement and less leaning, introducing himself as Taz.

“It’s short for Tazim,” Everitt offers, helpfully. “Anyway, wanna play winner, Beth?”

She does. She stands up to slide into the seat across from him, to play black, when Taz, who she notices is clearly trying to hide a smirk, asks, “Do you want to bet? We usually go for 100 pounds, Egyptian not British, which is maybe a little more than, say, $50 American or so?”

“Sure,” she says, and Everitt nods his agreement as well, and she gestures for him to make his first move.

The three of them talk as they play, and she learns that Taz and Everitt are old friends from Oxford, who bonded over both having overbearing (and, unspokenly, quite well-off) parents, and then fortuitously ended up in the same place several years later. 

About 15 or so moves into the game, Taz asks what brings her to Cairo, and she tells him about her ambition of world-travelling, and she asks them the same question in turn.

“Had to start working in my father’s business eventually,” Taz says, with a note of resignation, and she doesn’t press.

Everett, in what seems to be his typical style, gives more detail, explaining that he’s a foreign correspondent for The Times, and adds in a sardonic tone that they’ve sent him over with the ambition that his “in-country connections” (at which he gestures to Taz) will allow him to “keep an eye on Nasser and spot the next Suez crisis.” He looks skeptical, and then smiles winningly. “But really, I’m just here for the adventure. Anyway, what do you do?”

“You know,” drawls Taz. “For a newspaper man, you really don’t read the newspapers much.”

“Huh?” asks Everett in surprise.

“You’re Beth Harmon, right?” he asks her.

She nods at him with a quick smile, and moves her piece.

“She’s a world-renowned chess player. Recently beat some major Russian grandmaster, it was all over the news. Honestly, Everett, you know there are sections in the newspaper other than those on politics, right?” He pauses for a sec. “Also, I’m pretty sure that’s checkmate.”

He looks shocked for a moment, while Beth can’t contain her grin any longer. He studies the board for a moment, then breaks out into guffaws of laughter. “Well,” he says, “you definitely got me.” He digs into his pocket for his wallet, then proceeds to shake her hand and hand over the money. She glances at it.

“This is only 95 pounds,” she says.

“I know,” he replies smilingly. “I was going to use the other five to buy you a drink.”

It’s smooth, she has to admit. But there are a thousand and one reasons it’s a bad idea. 

“It’s 4 p.m.!” she says.

“I know it’s 4 p.m. You’re on vacation, come have a drink with me.”

“I don’t drink,” she replies, and is impressed with herself by how casually she says it.

“Well, would you look at that!” Taz jokes. “She’s a better Muslim than me.”

Everett gives Taz a fond but exasperated look, and turns back to Beth. “Okay, so it’s 4 p.m., and you’re on vacation. Come have a non-alcoholic drink with me.”

There are still nine hundred and ninety-nine reasons why it’s probably a bad idea. But she shrugs her shoulders. “Okay.”

* * *

Taz makes himself scarce as soon as she gives Everett an affirmative answer. They end up at some hole in the wall bar, which seems to be populated by people like Everett - expats, trying to act like they have an edge. She orders guava juice, and Everett orders whiskey. He looks almost apologetic for it though, as if he knows he’s playing a part.

She smiles. “You think you’re Ernest Hemingway, don’t you?”

“No, of course not,” he says. “He’s far too American. I’d much rather think of myself as T.E. Lawrence.”

 _Well_ , she thinks. _At least he’s self aware._

It’s enough to prompt him to tell his whole life story, and she learns that he, among other things, is the son of a second son of a viscount, studied English at Oxford, is is not unfond of the sound of his own voice, and is, she admits reluctantly, quite witty and plenty charming, although perhaps a touch less so than he thinks he is.

When he runs out of air, or seems to realize it’s polite to _ask_ questions too, he swirls the whiskey around in its glass and fixes her with an inquisitive look. “So, Beth Harmon, world traveler? Why?”

She’s not sure she really feels like getting into it with this man who is really a stranger, so she just shrugs and answers, “I had time, money, and inclination.”

“Sure,” he says. “‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’ and all that. I get it, but ‘time, money, and inclination’ would explain you visiting Paris or Rome. I’m not sure it explains Cairo.”

He is much more perceptive than he lets on, and she is suddenly reminded that he is, after all, a journalist.

“This isn’t like, on the record, is it?” she asks.

He laughs. “No, if I started filing copy about conversations I had with women in bars, no matter how interesting they were, I’d get a stern call from the home office. You’re safe from me, so that’s no reason for you not to answer.”

“I don’t know how to put it, exactly,” she starts. But she makes a good attempt at explaining to him her wanderlust, how she’d realized she’d been viewing the world with blinders on, and now wanted to test out her peripheral vision.

“Ah,” he says knowingly. “You want to see the seedy underbelly of life.”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly how I’d phrase it, but sure, why not.”

“It’s a myth, you know. A fantasy. It’s like… okay, where are you from Beth?”

“Lexington, in Kentucky.”

“Okay, and if someone wanted to know what the ‘real’ Lexington, Kentucky is like, what would you say?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a place, just people going about their lives.”

“Right, and so is every place else on earth. You want to know what life in a place is really like? You can’t learn that in five or six days or whatever, even if you give up hotels for hostels and hang out in cafes instead of gift shops.”

“I know that,” she says slowly, taken aback by his sudden vehemence.

He seems to come to and realize his voice has risen more than is perhaps appropriate for their topic of conversation. “Right, sorry. Of course you do, I’m afraid my living here has given me a rather inflated sense of my own importance.” He pauses. “But then if you know that, why are you really here, in Cairo?”

“Well, I don’t have anywhere better to be. And I guess I just wanted to enjoy life, have fun, all that.”

He picks up his glass. “Well, cheers to that.”

* * *

She follows him up the stairs to his apartment, a completion of the prophecy she’s already foreseen in the moment she agreed to take the last five pounds of her winnings in kind rather than in cash. 

His apartment is small and lacks a sufficient cooling system. It is, all in all, much less than she’d expect for the grandson of a viscount, but she supposes it’s all a part of his image. That as much as he’d given her grief in the bar for her pretensions at roughing it, he is more or less doing the same (which, now that she thinks of it, may have been the source of his outburst - self-recognition).

They strip each other’s clothes off quickly, glad to be rid of them in the heat, and tumble for the bed, pressing against each other without pretense. 

It’s different from her experiences of her previous lovers - none of the solemnity and passion of Borgov, nor the revelatory elation of Benny, or the awkwardness of Harry. It’s rather, for lack of anything else to say, fun. 

When they are finished, she rolls off him and they collapse back onto the bed, sated. He does not try to appease her with sweet nothings, which she appreciates the honesty of, but rather, once he’s caught his breath, throws his hands behind his head and asks, “How long are you staying? When can I see you again?”

 _Well_ , she thinks. _It’s good to know I still have it._

“I don’t have any fixed plans,” she says.

“Good. Have you been out to Giza already?”

Somehow, she and Mackenzie haven’t.

* * *

Which is how she finds herself in a rickety bus two days later, headed to the pyramids, with the unexpected combination of Everett, Taz, and Mackenzie. Taz had offered to have them driven there in one of his family’s cars, but Everett had shook his head and said that Beth wanted to do things the _local_ way. They were all polite enough not to point out that the locals didn’t exactly head out to the pyramids every weekend, so here they are in an overheated bus. 

Taz doesn’t seem too bothered though - he and Mackenzie seem to have hit it off, and their group has naturally split itself off into pairs. 

Before too long, the bus arrives at its destination, and they trundle their way out along with the other visitors. Beth is caught up in conversation with Everett, him teasingly placing his explorer-style hat on her head, so it takes her a moment to take in the full impact of her surroundings.

Her jaw drops. Of course, she’d known the pyramids would be massive. But pictures could not do them justice. She glances over at Mackenzie, who seems to be as taken as she is.

She’s sure Everett and Taz have seen this a hundred times, but she can’t imagine coming here and not just being overwhelmed.

The four of them wander in near silence, Everett’s normal chatter fading into silence as he realizes Beth’s desire for silence and solemnity, and they trail along paths until they end up at the sphinx.

“Think you’re up for a riddle?” Everett asks.

“I already know ‘what goes on four legs at morning, two legs during day, et cetera, et cetera,’” she says flatly.

“Too clever for me as always. There are other riddles, of course. But allow me to just ask you a question instead - what are you thinking?”

It’s difficult for her to sum it up in words, but perhaps trying to do so is good for her. She sighs. “It must do things to the mind, to grow up in the shadow of a civilization long declined. To know that all great powers end, that no matter how much stone you carry across the desert, someday you too will be conquered.”

“This too shall pass,” he offers.

“Exactly. Perhaps this explains the American mentality. We have few remnants of fallen civilizations to remind us of our own inevitable demise. Would probably be good for us if we did.”

He laughs, though she’s not really sure she’d meant to be funny, and takes her hand. It’s the first time he’s shown anything approaching _tenderness_ towards her, and she’s not sure she likes it. It doesn’t make her stomach flutter the way it had when Vasily had done so. Her stomach twists, instead, with something she rather thinks is anxiety.

* * *

“Are you in love?”

Everett asks her when they’re laying again naked in his bed, their toes touching but nothing else, as he reaches for a cigarette. (For a second, the act of cigarettes in bed reminds her of her time in Moscow - but no, it’s better not to go there). 

“Excuse me,” she asks affronted. “How self-obsessed are you? I’ve known you for _four days_!”

He laughs. “I didn’t mean with _me_. But it’s a fair question - a woman on the run from _something,_ as though she’s trying to forget? One wonders.”

“I’m not on the run or trying to forget. And it’s not really any of your business.”

But she takes the offered cigarette from his fingers anyway, and she knows he’s patient, he’ll wait her out.

“But yes, I suppose so. With someone, at least.” She thinks it’s the first time she’s admitted it, even to herself.

“At least? So you can’t decide between them then, is that it?”

“No,” she sighs. “One of them is . . . not an option.”

“Is the one who _is_ an option the one who’s the ‘someone’ or the one who’s the reason for the ‘at least?’”

She thinks this is an intensely odd conversation to be having with someone she’s just had sex with, but in for a penny, in for a pound. “The someone, I guess.”

“So then what’s the issue?”

“I’m,” she pauses, searching for the words. “Afraid of being tied down? Most of my life, I haven’t felt like I’ve had a lot of control, over myself, my time, my person, and for the first time in my life I feel truly free. And I’m not sure I’m ready to give that up yet, without really experiencing it first.”

“So your plan is to travel the world until you’ve quenched your thirst, and then hope he’s still waiting when you get back?”

“Something like that. But it’s more complicated than that, I’m not sure he’d have me in the first place.”

“Beth, I’m sure you’re worth waiting for,” he says, reclaiming the cigarette and watching the smoke trail upward towards the ceiling. “But every man has finite patience, even for a woman such as you. He’ll only wait if he knows he’s actually waiting for something, and if he doesn’t think he’ll be waiting forever.”

There’s not really much she can say to that, so she lets herself lay in his bed a little longer, watching the slide of the smoke, before rousing herself and starting to collect her clothes.

* * *

When she returns to the hostel, she sits on her bed, feet curled neatly under her, thinking. She’s not ready to face Benny, yet, she knows that. But she acknowledges to herself that “yet” is the appropriate word, that she wants the last stop on her world tour to be New York.

And she knows that Everett is right - among the multitude of ways she’s treated Benny poorly, going on a multi-continental jaunt after everything he did to help her in the tournament in Moscow, with no explanation other than a too-clever-by-half postcard is definitely up there. So she pulls out the blank card that she’d pushed back into her knapsack at that cafe and hasn’t drawn back out, and starts writing.

She gives up on trying to come up with a witty line, and just writes the way she would to Jolene. She tells him about the museums, and meeting Taz and Everett in the cafe (a highly selected history, anyway), and about her reflections on mortality standing before the pyramids. She doesn’t even know if he’ll read it (though one advantage of postcards is you can’t throw them out without at least catching some of the words) but at least she knows she’s trying. She tucks it back into her bag to mail on her way out, and pulls out her atlas. 

She’s not ready to go back to New York, but she is ready to go somewhere else.

Mackenzie comes in, just as she’s deciding where to go next. “Are you leaving?” she asks.

She nods.

“Where are you headed?”

“Not sure yet. Any suggestions?”

“No, I, uh, think I’m going to stick around here a little longer myself.”

If Beth notices a faint blush on her cheeks, she charitably decides not to comment on it. Instead, they exchange addresses and phone numbers and promises to write, and Beth thinks she may even mean it.

* * *

_Jerusalem_

Jerusalem is . . . weird. Perhaps she should have expected this - that any place so fought over, by people each with their own trauma, collective and individual, which after all, saw a war a _year_ ago, would be weird. But in this city, endowed by so many people with such deeper meaning, she had hoped she would feel stirred. So far, she hasn’t.

Sure, the food is great. She discovers shawarma, and shakshuka, and a thousand different things to do with eggplants. She likes wandering around The Shuk, the sprawling market place where she’s been massively overcharged for coffee and sampled as many different varieties of a sesame-based dessert called halva she can before the vendor gives her the stink eye. She’s spent enough time wandering markets now to know that they’re different everywhere she goes, but have a comforting familiarity to them. 

So, she likes the food. But she feels like there is a layer between her and the rest of the city. The people are not unfriendly, exactly, but nor are they talkative, and she tries and fails to strike up conversations several times, at The Shuk, or cafes, or just on the street. There is so much weight here, of history and tragedy and she doesn’t know where to begin or how to break through.

On her third day in Jerusalem, she walks around the Old City, passing through the Jewish quarter to the Arab quarter to the Christian quarter, to the Armenian quarter. And between them all, they have one commonality - their primary purpose seems to be to hawk souvenirs to tourists (and as she hasn’t bought her customary two postcards yet, she succumbs to their offers and takes this opportunity).

She finds it a little disappointing. But perhaps there really aren’t any sacred places in life. Maybe Everett was right that there isn’t any deeper meaning to be found in the nooks and crannies of foreign places, only people scraping by. 

With these desolate thoughts snaking through her head, Beth follows the signs to the Western Wall, once part of the Second Temple, and approaches a girl on the women’s side of the wall who looks to be about her age, who she’d heard speaking American-accented English to an older woman she assumes is her mother.

“Sorry,” she says, “but would you mind explaining what the pieces of paper are for?”

The girl looks surprised, but explains courteously, “People write prayers, or wishes, and fold up the papers and push them into the cracks of the wall, and God is supposed to see, or hear them.” She gives Beth a curious look. “What brings you here?”

“Just exploring,” she answers. “How about you, do you live here?”

“No, visiting, my first time actually. My aunt and uncle moved here last year, after the war.” 

“Are you thinking about moving too?” Beth asks.

“No, not really. I get it, I do, but LA is my home, and this, well, isn’t.”

Beth is unsure how exactly to respond to this confession, though she supposes it’s her fault for asking the question in the first place, and an awkward moment descends. Beth is prepared to thank the girl for the information and slip away, when she suddenly presses a torn scrap of paper and pen into Beth’s hand. “Here,” she says. “There’s no rule that says you have to be Jewish to leave notes.”

Beth takes them and thanks her, and then considers. _What_ do _I wish for?_ she wonders. 

Briefly, she ponders that she would wish to know what it is she wants. But that’s not it, exactly. 

Perhaps she wishes that she wanted the things she thought she was supposed to want. But that’s not quite right either - she wants those things, but is frightened of them all the same. _Okay then_ she thinks, and writes, “I want to live without fear,” and deposits the note in the only open crevice she can find.

Nothing immediate happens, but after returning the pen to the girl and thanking her one more time, it occurs to her that there is something else she probably wishes.

 _I want to leave Jerusalem,_ she thinks.

That one she can make happen, so she does.

* * *

_Florence, Italy_

After Thai, and Arabic, and Hebrew, the sound of Italian in Beth’s ears feels almost like coming home. She doesn’t speak it, per se, but she’s picked up bits of French and Spanish from her previous travels, so she can more or less pick her way through the words.

She reads in her guide book about the Grand Tour - the tradition of the sons of landed British gentlemen in the 18th and 19th centuries to tour the continent, and Italy in particular, after completing their studies, and she likes that, the idea of following in their footsteps, but with her own twist.

She embraces the idea of the Grand Tour, and doesn’t pretend not to be a tourist. She quickly discovers that this is a city built around tourism now, that the people coming from out of town are at least half the economy.

There are olive oil stains on the postcards she writes to Benny and Jolene, from the restaurant she’d ate at on her third night, where she’d miraculously found that she actually loves zucchini when it’s slathered in garlic and olive oil. She’s discovered that Italian cuisine involves much less spaghetti in tomato sauce than she’d been led to believe by American life. Although it involves plenty of that too, so perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she’s discovered it involves much more than that. 

She visits the art museums, and is drawn in by the light and color of the Renaissance scenes. She’s never been an art aficionado, but she can at least acknowledge the beauty, even if she doesn’t understand why it’s so beautiful. 

It’s in the Piazza del Duomo, entering the cathedral from which the plaza derives its name, that Beth realizes she has more or less made a tour of the major world religions. Okay, so she’s missed Hinduism, and she hadn’t gone into mosques in Egypt or Jerusalem, but she’s seen them from the outside. And if you count Moscow for “atheism,” it really is a grand tour. 

She’s not really sure what to make of it. Despite it being closer to the religion she was raised with, she doesn’t feel anything _more_ in the cathedral than she had at the temple in Bangkok, or at the Western Wall. In fact, she doesn’t really feel anything other than general admiration for the beauty of the art and architecture. 

So she can check off one fewer thing through which she can look to find meaning, and say she’s discovered something about herself (or at least confirmed a suspicion).

* * *

The city is always lively at night, but Beth has found that her favorite time of day is dusk, when even families are still out and about, but the glow of light from the setting sun casts an almost mystical glean over everything. 

She’s sitting on a bench facing the replica of David in the Piazza della Signoria, eating what is far and away the best gelato (or ice cream) she’s ever had in her life. She’s perhaps _too_ enraptured by it (the richness of the dark chocolate, the complexity of the flavor), since she doesn’t notice the man approaching until he’s standing right in front of her.

“Hi,” he says, in accented English that reveals him to be a local, or at least from the country. (She’d found it mysterious that everyone she talks to automatically speaks to her in English, until she asked a server at a cafe. He’d shrugged. “I can’t describe it, you’re just obviously American. We know how to tell by now.”)

He gestures to the other half of the bench. “Is this seat taken?”

She looks up and sees - he is almost unfairly attractive. Floppy brown hair, lightly tanned, smooth skin, and a deep intensity in his eyes, and yet - 

She realizes she’s not interested in passing the evening playing coy conversational games over coffee or wine, following him back to his apartment, and then lying in the afterglow and speaking in riddles to each other, only for her to fly hundreds of miles away in three days or a week or whenever she’s on to the next thing. 

That’s not to say she hasn’t enjoyed that kind of thing, the transient relationships she’s found, intimate and otherwise. She has, and it’s been fun while it’s lasted but there’s something - 

But she doesn’t want - 

_Oh,_ she realizes. _I don’t want to live like this, bouncing from place to place, without roots, forever._

She also realizes that an uncomfortable amount of time has elapsed since the man spoke to her, and she’s probably been staring distantly, with God knows what expression on her face.

She shakes her head, half in dissent, half to clear the cobwebs. “Sorry. I, uh, while the seat’s not literally taken, I think it may be metaphorically.”

“Understood,” he replies politely. “I hope you have a pleasant evening.” And then just _leaves_ , leaving Beth alone, with a thousand thoughts and an existential crisis and melting gelato.

She can see the vague outlines of a life now, coming into form in her mind, and it no longer terrifies her. She pictures, with ease, waking up every day to Benny beside her, and finds she rather likes the idea.

The only fear she feels now is that he’ll reject her, tell her it’s been too long, or she messed up too badly in the first place.

She considers, briefly, catching a plane _right now_ and flying to New York and knocking on his door until he lets her in and lets her _explain_.

But no. She sees now, there’s somewhere she has to go first.

* * *

_Paris, France_

Beth decides if she’s going to do this, she’s going to do it properly - which is to say, she abandons all pretense of gritty realism and books herself a room in the nicest hotel she can reasonably afford, with cream colored walls, and bon bons in the lobby, and bellhops who are paid to smile and open doors for her.

Her flight was in the morning, so she has the rest of the day to explore, and makes her way to the Latin Quarter, where she walks aimlessly, trying not to remember all the reasons she didn’t make her way out here last time she was here, before she stumbles upon a medieval-looking building.

The signs proclaim it to be the Musée de Cluny, a museum of medieval history, and, on an impulse, she decides to go in.

It turns out to primarily be an art museum, and she passively admires the tapestries and Gothic-era jewelry, without really finding anything that turns her head.

But then, she follows a ramp into another room, and illuminated by the lights of the display, it is - a grouping of medieval chess sets and pieces. 

The pieces are a little different from the modern ones of course - some more intricately carved with full scenes on them, some much simpler than those she’s familiar with, and all inevitably chipped by time, but still unavoidably recognizable as chess. 

It is just that - okay, so she’s known for a while now that she’s not truly alone, that there are people that care about her and are there for her. 

But this - to know that she’s a part of a tradition that stretches back a thousand years, that before France was even properly a _country_ people on this land were discovering the same game she discovered in a basement in an orphanage - it makes her feel connected to something greater than herself.

She’s not sure how long she stands there, trying to make sense of the reason why her throat suddenly feels tight and her eyes suddenly sting. 

It must be a long time, because eventually she’s cautiously approached by a security guard, who tentatively asks, “ _Mademoiselle? Vous parlez Anglais?_ Are you alright?”

She nods, and flees.

* * *

But after that, Beth lets herself fall in love with Paris. She visits the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tour, and strolls the Champs Elyseés. She takes a day and takes the train to Versaille and allows herself to fantasize, just a little bit about living there (before remembering she _is_ fairly attached to running water).

She goes shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and spends way too much money on dresses and shoes, as though over-paying for something while in a beautiful building makes it worth the price. She trudges along with her shopping bags for the fifteen minute walk to the hot chocolate place on Rue de Rivoli the concierge had recommended.

It’s called Angelina, and it’s her new favorite place in the world. The chocolate itself is delicious, but it’s served in the most delicate tea cups, with swirls of whipped cream, and the walls are trimmed with gold. It’s the perfect atmosphere for her to write up the postcards she’d bought in Versailles. 

She gives Jolene a full run down, and dashes off a brief but friendly note to Mackenzie, figuring she’ll see it whenever she winds up back in Canada. 

Her card to Benny, though, gives her more grief than it has since she tried to figure out what to write to him while sitting in that cafe in Cairo. 

There’s so much she wants to say to him now, but none of it really appropriate for a postcard. It feels silly, to write a long letter describing the ceiling finishings in the Hall of Mirrors and pretend there’s no significance to her being here, in this city, but nor can she put any of it into words.

She considers and discards a number of attempts at witty one-liners, some darkly humorous (“So far, it’s gone better than last time”), but mostly just a little too sincere and overwrought (“I’m trying to make my own second chances”). 

In the end, though she decides maybe she doesn’t have to write anything. With any luck, she’ll be seeing him soon enough, maybe even before the postcard would have arrived.

But first, there’s one more demon she has to exorcise.

* * *

Later that evening, stepping back into the hotel bar where she’d met Cleo all those months ago is, in its own way, almost physically painful. But she steels her courage, and sidles up to the bar to flag down the bartender.

Her initial plan had been to have precisely one drink, in fulfillment of her original concession to Cleo. But now, in hindsight, she realizes that the place where she’d veered off the tracks wasn’t the second drink. The second was already an inevitability by the existence of the first.

So when the bartender sees her, she orders cranberry juice. 

Or she attempts to. She’d tried to order in French, but apparently she’s messed up the words because the bartender gives her a confused look and says “I do speak English, of course.”

She gives a half laugh. “Thanks, just cranberry juice, please.”

She’s pretty sure this is not the same bartender as the last time she was here, thank God. Granted, her memory of that night is pretty fuzzy, so perhaps she wouldn’t know even if he was, but he doesn’t seem to recognize her, and she’s glad to spare herself the embarrassment.

He returns with her drink and she pays, not wanting to tempt fate through an open tab, and in the polite way of people who are being paid to be nice, he asks her what brings her here.

“To Paris? Or to this hotel in particular?”

“Either, I suppose, though I meant Paris.”

“The answer’s the same either way - last time I was here, I was unhappy, and did things I regretted as soon as I did them. And I want to overwrite those memories, if you will.”

She thinks it might be oversharing, but as a bartender, presumably he’s used to that, as he just nods. “Yes, you can’t let the past ruin Paris for you. I’m biased, of course, but it’s the greatest city on earth.”

She laughs lightly, and with that he leaves her to her solitude.

She sits for a bit, taking in the surroundings, reminding herself that she’s not the same person she was last time she was here. She’s grown, she understands herself better. She’s probably a better chess player too (after all, she’s beaten Borgov), though that feels a little less important right now. 

She finishes her drink and nods goodbye to the bartender, and then heads back to her hotel.

* * *

In the morning she wakes naturally, the sun poking through the lace of the hotel room curtains. 

She heads out to go to a patisserie for one last morning croissant, and then returns to her hotel, where she throws her stuff into the extra suitcase she’d bought to accommodate the impacts of Parisian clothing stores, heads downstairs to check out, and then catches a taxi to Orly Airport.

After the taxi drops her off and pulls away from the curb, she makes a beeline for the first payphone she can find, and dials a phone number she never really bothered trying to forget. 

It’s only after she’s dialed that she remembers it’s 6:30 a.m. in New York, but Benny picks up on the second ring anyway.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me, uh, it’s Beth. I’m at the airport in Paris.”

There is a moment of silence and Beth curls her fingers nervously around the phone wire, fairly convinced that the beating of her heart would be audible to Benny all the way across the Atlantic even without the aid of telephonic connection. 

“Are you okay?”

She takes the fact that he hasn’t hung up on her yet to be a positive sign, but she also doesn’t think he fully gets the impact of what she’s trying to do here. Which, fair enough, she clearly woke him up, so he can be excused if his brain isn’t firing on all cylinders. 

“No, no it’s fine, everything’s fine. I’m just, okay, so I’ve spent the last month traveling around the world and spent the last few days here, trying to rewrite history, and now I’m,” and she puts careful emphasis on these finals words, “ _calling you from the airport in Paris_.” 

“Oh! _Oh!_ Beth is this like, is this like a _gesture_?”

“Yeah, I guess so, a little bit. I’m, uh, sorry about the whole forgetting about time differences thing, I think that makes it much less of a gesture.”

But Benny is laughing, a sound of pure delight and astonishment. “No, definitely worth waking up for. Okay, okay, tell me where you are one more time.”

“Benny,” she repeats, “I’m at the airport in Paris.”

“Come to New York? I can pick you up when you get here.”

“Okay,” she says, not even bothering to fight her smile. “I’ll see you soon.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth returns to New York.

_New York, New York_

As her plane touches down in JFK, Beth is vaguely aware of a sense of anxiety pooling in her stomach. Sure, Benny had sounded happy to hear from her, and had extended the invitation to New York, and offered to pick her up. And she’d called back with the flight information once she’d actually bought her ticket, and they’d fixed the time and place where they’d meet, so unless this is a very cruel and elaborate ruse on his part, she’s pretty sure he’ll actually be there.

So that’s not really what she’s anxious about. It’s more that she’s worried that it won’t be like she’s imagined it to be. She’s a different person since the last times she saw Benny, and she’s sure he is too. She’s a better person, she thinks, but what if they don’t _work_ any more, what if they don’t have anything in common any more (well, she supposes, that’s not really possible, but a more precise concern would be “what if they don’t have anything other than chess in common any more”), what if they end up screaming at each other by the end of the day?

Well, perhaps that last one might actually help clear things up.

These thoughts buzzing through her mind, she makes her way off the plane, collects her luggage, deals with customs, and finally heads out the airport, into the late afternoon sun.

And there, idling by the curb of the passenger pickup zone, is a familiar car.

Benny has clearly been eyeing the line of people streaming out of the sliding doors, because the second she steps through he’s hopped out of the car and is popping open the trunk for her luggage.

She makes her way to him, and they smile at each other, a little awkwardly, and exchange greetings. He makes a gesture that is clearly an offer to take her bags.

The corner of her lips lifts up. “Such a gentleman,” she teases.

“I try,” he replies, with a half laugh.

It’s not even a particularly clever comment, but just like that, the ice is broken, and he’s giving her a real smile and then suddenly they’re hugging fiercely, luggage forgotten and starting to tip over, and she’s missed him so, so much.

“I can’t believe you’re really here,” he says softly, perhaps more to himself than to her, as though to reassure himself of reality, but she understands. She can’t really believe it either.

* * *

Their drive back is neither silent nor overly talkative. They make pleasant conversation about the plane ride, whether Beth ate already, whether she slept on the plane. She didn’t, much, and is horribly tired, but Benny reminds her that if she falls asleep now she’ll be stuck with jetlag. 

“Do you think drinking coffee at 5 p.m. is a bad idea?” she ponders.

“Yes,” he replies straightforwardly. “I don’t think you being awake at 2 is the solution either.”

She makes an inarticulate noise of discontent, and he chuckles softly. “Come on, we’re not that far from my apartment, and then we can order takeout or throw something together, and you’ll be able to go to sleep before you know it.”

She nods her consent, and leans her face up against the window, watching the city rising up above her. Benny warns her not to fall asleep, but she doesn’t think she’d be able to anyway - the glass is cold against her face and it invigorates her slightly. She doesn’t need anyone to take care of her - she knows that, and she’s certain Benny knows it too, but Benny’s careful care for her, even over something as simple as jetlag, makes a warm feeling spark in her chest. 

They stay like that, in companionable silence, until Benny pulls up in front of a building that Beth has, at times, tried so hard to erase from her memory in the past months, and the warm feeling intensifies.

Benny makes a big show of taking her bags again, and as she trails him inside and down the hall to his apartment, he jokes offhandedly, “Did you stock up on a lot of rocks when you were gone or something?”

“Nah, just all but burned through the rest of my prize from Moscow on dresses in Paris.”

There’s a flash of amusement and something else she can’t identify in his eyes, but he quickly parries back, “You do know we have perfectly nice shopping opportunities here in New York, right?”

“Yeah, but Paris is _Paris_.”

“You know, as a New Yorker, I ought to take personal offence,” he answers as they reach his door. He unlocks it, and holds it open for her, a touch of chivalry which is definitely beyond his usual behavior, and she flops herself into one of the chairs at his kitchen table while he props her luggage up against a wall.

Her eyes flick to the other side of the room, where he still lacks a sofa and hasn’t laid out the mat she slept on the last time she was here. She thinks she’s tired enough that her glance was probably too obvious and sluggish to avoid his notice, but if he did see he doesn’t remark on it.

After he’s finished with her luggage, he deliberately sets himself in the chair across from her and asks, “You must be hungry, right? I don’t have a ton of food here, but I could make pasta or something, or we could order out?”

“Benny,” she announces in mock seriousness. “I think our next goal should be learning how to cook.”

“I can cook!” he exclaims. She gives him a doubtful look and he continues more sedately, “Well, at least I can cook better than you can.”

“That,” she says, “is a very low bar.”

“Hey, you said it, not me.” he returns. “So what I’m getting from this conversation though, unless you plan on embarking on your Michelin star training while jet lagged, is that we should probably order out.”

They end up walking in the crisp evening air to pick up Chinese food from a restaurant a couple blocks away, which they bring back to the apartment and tear into. 

It’s greasy and delicious, but as Benny notes, “Probably not particularly authentic. I’m sure with all your exploring, you know the difference better than I.”

“I mean, I didn’t make it to China, not sure how welcome we’d be there these days. Closest I got was Thailand, so if we get Thai takeout, I can provide much better information.”

They lapse into silence for a bit, until Beth picks up a new conversational thread. “So, anything new you’ve been up to lately?”

“Nah, not really, just the usual. Burying my nose in chess books. Been doing a little bit of writing on strategy, again, but not sure it’s anything I’ll try to get published. And went to a couple tournaments, but mostly local, or at least this side of the country. So, you know, while you were in Florence, I was in New Jersey, so it’s not really clear who should be jealous of who here.”

“What’s wrong with New Jersey?”

“Well,” he drawls. “It’s not Florence.”

And they pass the evening like that, long after they’ve eaten their fill of dinner and the leftover food has gone cold on the table. They don’t discuss anything serious, and Beth knows that if this, if they, are going to be real, they will have to have those conversations at some point, but for tonight they just bathe in the luxury of being able to talk to each other. 

Conversation with Benny is almost enough to fight her drooping eyelids, but eventually the power of an eight-and-a-half hour flight and six hour time zone change catches up to her, and at more or less 9 o’clock on the dot, she announces that she thinks it’s the earliest time she can justify as a reasonable time to sleep.

Benny laughs and agrees, and they clear away the leftover containers, the unspoken question of where exactly this sleeping will take place hanging over them as they tidy.

Finally, when the kitchen is clean and they have no more tasks to hide behind, Benny turns to her cautiously. “I can go grab the mat for you to sleep on. Or…” 

Whether he lets his voice trail off out of deliberate implication or due to awkwardness she’s not sure, but either way, she prompts him, “Or?”

“Or we can share. My room, that is. I mean, obviously only if you want. It can mean, uh, as much or as little as you like.”

She’s pretty sure she can identify the emotion coursing through her as relief. “I’d like that,” she replies, with uncharacteristic shyness, and he smiles back at her. 

“Good.”

After they’ve both changed and brushed their teeth, carefully navigating around each other in the small bathroom, they crawl into bed, and then slowly each gravitate to the center of it. 

Benny cautiously loosely wraps his arm to lay across her waist, and when she doesn’t pull away, and in fact leans her head back against his shoulder, he tightens his grip and holds her closer.

“Goodnight, Benny,” she whispers. 

And the last thing she recalls before jet lag overtakes her and she crashes into sleep, is the feeling of him softly kissing the top of her head.

* * *

Beth wakes before Benny does, still struggling to adjust to New York time, but he seems so peaceful and the warmth of his body against hers is so calming, that she decides against trying to disentangle herself, and instead stays curled up against him, letting her mind drift.

It’s hard to tell time in Benny’s underground apartment, but she realizes she must have fallen back asleep, as the next thing she remembers is Benny lightly stirring beside her.

Her eyes flick open and she turns towards him. “Are you awake?” she whispers.

“Yeah,” he replies, voice still scratchy from sleep. He clears his throat and tries again. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” she replies, and she feels like the sappiest person in the world and they haven’t actually _talked_ about anything of significance yet but she _can’t stop smiling_.

He must feel the same way (she very much hopes) because he returns her smile, and his thumb starts moving in mindless circles where his hand has been resting against her back.

“What do you want to do today?” he asks.

“Hm?” she replies, still too caught in the cobwebs of sleep and distracted by the pleasant feeling of waking up like this to fully process his question immediately. “Oh, I had really no plans. Did you have something in mind?”

“Well, since you’re the professional tourist these days, we could go sightseeing? I haven’t hit a lot of the major touristy spots, so it would be a new experience for me too. I think it doesn’t count against your reputation as a local if you go with someone else who doesn’t live here.”

She laughs at this speech, not least of which because, as much as Benny loves to play the jaded native New Yorker, “You’re not from here either.”

“Shhhh,” he says with pretend solemnity. “You can’t just go giving away my secrets like that.” Then, letting the pretension fall from his voice, “So, what do you think? Sightseeing?”

She thinks sightseeing sounds lovely.

* * *

On the subway on their way over, Benny blesses the Natural History Museum as “Somewhere even locals think is cool.”

“So what you’re trying to tell me,” Beth quips, “is that you’ve been there before.”

“Okay that was not _precisely_ my intended meaning, but yeah, I have.”

“We can go somewhere you haven’t been before, you know. Even,” she lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “if you’re afraid someone might spot you there and think you’re from out of town.”

“Offer much appreciated, but I have no issue going back. It’s pretty neat.”

“Okay,” she singsongs. “As long as you accept we’re going to the Statue of Liberty and Times Square _eventually_.”

He groans theatrically as they pull into their stop, and she follows him out of the train, through the turnstile, and into the light.

A few minutes later, they stroll through the Hall of African mammals at the Natural History Museum, making passing comments at the various creatures they encounter. As they walk, Beth can’t help but reflect on the newness of the banter between them - it’s always been there, that ability to joke with each other, but it’s previously been weighed down so much by seriousness and ambition and a hundred other things, that she’d had now idea it could be like this seemingly all the time. Of course, she knows this initial haze can very well pass, but she’s resolved to enjoy it while it lasts.

Beth is interrupted from her meditations when they’re nearly toppled over by a pack of what look to be elementary school students, rushing over to the exhibit of a stuffed hyena. 

Benny catches her hand to steady her, and she feels that butterflyish feeling again. For a second, they’re just looking at each other, and he looks at her like the words he spoke at the airport are still true - that he can’t believe she’s there.

But then another of the children runs by, brushing past them, and the moment is broken.

She clears her throat, trying to come up with some new subject to dispel the awkwardness of the interruption, but Benny comes up with one first. 

“You know, it’s funny to see a school group here. Makes me feel like I’m ditching class or something, by being out and about in the middle of a day on a weekday.”

She thinks comments about how she ditched class all the time, but only to go play chess in the basement, might go over flat here, so she remarks, “I didn’t even know what day of the week it was, honestly. It’s like I’ve lost all sense of time.”

“Ah yes, what a hardship,” he answers drily. “Traveling so much the normal structures of time no longer apply to you. It’s a Tuesday, for what it’s worth.”

“Thanks,” she replies, in an equally dry tone.

“Any time. Now,” he continues, his voice rising to a level of excitement that could match the third graders bowling them over to get to the hyenas, “let’s go check out the dinosaurs.”

* * *

After tiring themselves out at the museum, they walk to get a late lunch at Zabar’s, a deli attached to a grocery store, which Benny assures Beth is a, “ _Classic_ New York institution.”

Beth gets a roast beef sandwich and Benny matzo ball soup, which they carefully tote on trays over to two of the only remaining seats in the cafe. 

Over lunch, Benny asks all about her travels, beyond what she’d included in her postcards. They haven’t discussed it much, so far, perhaps because she’d been too tired to give a vivid description last night. And besides, she hadn’t wanted to seem like she was showing off all the places she’d been while he’d been in New York reading about chess.

But he seems genuinely interested, and laughs at all the appropriate times, and doesn’t seem to feel like her reflections about human and civilizational mortality at the pyramids, or reflections about atheism in Florentine cathedrals, are ridiculous.

She can tell there’s something he wants to ask, and she intuits it’s likely about her visit to Paris - a topic she’s somewhat skirted around thus far in their conversations. So she lets the conversation fall into a lull, and gives him the space to ask, and he does.

“How long were you in Paris for?”

She tells him all of it, about feeling like she needed to chase down any remaining demons before coming back to the US (and implicitly, to him), about the medieval chess set she found and how much it impacted her, about all the ways she ended up falling in love with the city, and of ending up in _that_ bar on her last night.

He’s quiet, and then softly, he says, “I know it’s not really my feeling on this that’s important, but for what it’s worth, I’m proud of you.”

“No,” she replies. “It does mean something. It means a lot, thank you.”

They fall silent for a few moments, the sincerity of the words settling over them, until Benny asks, “Did you think about meeting up with Cleo? Or have you talked to her since, well, the last time you were there at all?”

She shakes her head. “Have you?”

His face twists into a wry smile. “Once. It did not go particularly well. I was, well, pretty mad about the whole thing. And she was her usual self, which is to say blithe and not especially apologetic.”

For a second, Beth is about to tell him Borgov’s theory of Cleo’s affiliations. But she thinks better of it before she can. For one thing, telling someone their ex-whatever might be on the KGB payroll is maybe likely to meet with some pushback. And for another, if he asked her to explain the origins of the theory, which he no doubt would, there was really no way to do so without bringing up Vasily and more specifically the nature of her relationship with him which - 

Okay, which she should tell him _eventually_ , because secrets are a bad idea, especially if this is going to be something (she still sputters over the word slightly, even in her mind) _long-term_. And by eventually, she really means _soon_. 

But it doesn’t really seem like the place to do it, and she doesn’t want to spoil what has been a wonderful lunch, and he just said he was _proud_ of her, so she promises herself she’ll tell him when she has the opportunity, and instead just takes the last bite of her sandwich and says, “Sounds about right,” and lets the conversation drop.

Benny has already finished his soup, and props his head to rest on top of his folded hands and looks at her inquisitively. “Do you have anything particular you want to do in the afternoon? If not, I have an idea.”

“Nothing in particular, no.”

“We could go to Fifth Avenue? I promised you the fashion here was better than in Paris.”

“Won’t that be boring for you? You really want to sit around and watch me try on dresses?”

His face turns a delightful shade of pink. “Maybe a little bit, yeah.”

“I do still have a lot of stuff I bought in Paris I haven’t worn yet, though.”

“Ah, no, that’s fine then, it was just an idea. Some other time.”

“Some other time, then,” she agrees.

“So then what should we do?” he queries.

In response, she only grins, which is enough for him to drop his head so it’s covered by his hands.

* * *

As much as Benny had complained about it, the view from the top of the Empire State building is absolutely gorgeous. 

“You claim to love New York,” Beth points out, “And yet you’ve been missing this perfect place to admire it from.”

“Okay, I’m willing to concede that my aversion to coming up here may have been somewhat misplaced.”

“Thank you for your honesty,” she chirps, and they walk on, Benny pointing out city landmarks from their point of view.

“So,” he says. “Are you going to buy a nice replica in the gift shop downstairs?”

“No, but I think you should, I think it might go well in your apartment,” she replies, and flips her hair for emphasis.

He just shakes his head, and she continues, “In seriousness, I might actually want to swing by the gift store downstairs and pick up a couple postcards.”

Something flashes across his face - fear? - but he plays it off by lightly joking, “And here I thought I was special.”

“They’re for Jolene and Mackenzie, that girl I met at the hostel,” she explains, in case his comment is half in jest, wholly in earnest.

“Who’s Jolene?” he asks, and she realizes she’s actually never told him. 

The stories of the bright spots in her troubled (to put it mildly) childhood take them downstairs and to the cash register of the gift shop, and when they step outside as it’s turning towards evening he asks, “Were you serious about wanting to learn how to cook?”

“Yeah, I realized I really can’t survive on restaurant food and grilled cheese forever. Gotta grow up sometime. Why, did you have any ideas?”

“Not in particular, but there’s a grocery store by my house - we can see if anything inspires us.”

“That sounds perfect,” she says, and he points them to the nearest subway station.

* * *

They decide to make a chili that Benny says he has made successfully a couple times before, which Beth points out betrays his Southwestern roots.

“Besides, I’m not sure how you really intend to play the jaded New Yorker when you dress like that,” she says, gesturing at him.

His voice takes on a note of genuine defense. “Dressed like what?” he asks.

Instead of answering verbally, she leans over to flick the brim of his hat up, which he hasn’t removed since they’ve gotten inside. 

“Careful Beth,” he says. “I hope you remember who’s the one who knows how to make dinner here.”

“Okay, okay, I think you win that one. I defer to your knowledge on how to proceed.”

In the end, Benny ends up doing most of the cooking while Beth studiously watches, but she thinks the process doesn't seem quite as intimidating as it did before. 

Dinner is pleasant, the kind of night on which, in another life, they might have enjoyed languidly sharing a bottle of wine. But Beth diverts herself from these thoughts before she can truly go down that path, and refocuses her attention to the evening as it is.

After they’ve finished eating, she offers to do the dishes, since Benny did most of the cooking (and instructing). It’s hard to talk over the sound of washing dishes, but Beth suddenly becomes aware of Benny’s eyes on her from where he’s propped himself against the counter.

“What?” she asks, turning off the faucet to speak.

He shakes his head, and for a second she thinks he’s going to say it’s nothing or just look away, but then suddenly he strides across the kitchen, faster than she can blink, and he’s there, right in front of her. She’s not sure which of them reaches for the other, but then they’re kissing, desperate and without hesitancy, her hands slung around his neck to pull him closer to her.

The water from the counter is starting to seep into the back of her shirt, from how they’ve leaned themselves against the cabinets to stay upright, and it momentarily brings Beth back to herself.

“What about the dishes?” she asks. 

Benny gives her an almost disbelieving smile. “I think we can manage to do the dishes later.” He pauses. “I’ve kind of been wanting to kiss you all day.”

“Then why didn’t you?” she asks.

“We were in _public_ ,” he replies, blushing. “And besides…”

He lets his voice trail off, but she knows exactly what he’s trying to say. As ridiculous as it seems in this moment, with his hands resting along her hip bones in his kitchen and both of them with kiss-bitten lips, she hadn’t felt certain of his feelings either.

So, to reassure him, she reaches up on her toes and kisses him again - slower, this time, her hands shifting to cup his face. 

And she thinks, since he had kissed her first initially, it’s probably on her to take the next step. But as she’s contemplating how to most suavely tug him into his bedroom, she realizes - 

She had promised herself she’d tell him about Borgov. And the decent thing to do would probably be to tell him before they actually _sleep together_. So she draws back.

And Benny must read something on her face, because his turns to a look of concern. “Beth, is everything okay?”

Okay, so she has absolutely no clue how to tell him this. She shuffles her feet slightly.

“Okay so, um, I feel like in the interest of full disclosure I should tell you that, uh -”

He cuts her off. “Beth, if you’re trying to tell me that you’ve, well, been with other people since, uh, _since_ it’s okay. I’m not mad, I don’t mind, it’s okay.”

“Really?” she asks, her voice way more vulnerable than she would ever like to hear it sound again.

“ _Yes_. Afterall, I had told you to stop ca- that is to say, I would have no right to be mad. And, well,” he drags his hand through his hair. “It would be hypocritical of me anyway. I, uh, there were a few nights after we fought where all I wanted to do was go to a bar and find a stranger and just _forget_.” 

His voice wobbles on the last words, and it’s all she can do to surge forward and kiss him again, and it turns out she doesn’t need to try to be suave. By mutual agreement, they back themselves towards his bedroom, still entangled with each other. 

They can barely stop kissing to take each other’s clothes off, but once they do, Beth is suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that they are here, like this, together.

She trails her hands over his chest, his arms, his shoulders, as Benny watches her with a look in his eye she’s still scared to name, before she’s exhausted his patience and he pulls her back to him.

* * *

In the afterglow, they curl into the positions they’d slept in the night before, Beth’s back pressed to Benny’s chest, while he plays with her hair.

For a minute, she thinks he might make some horrible reference about how he _likes her hair _, but what comes out instead is -__

“Okay, I know I said I don’t mind. And I don’t! But I’m, okay, I’m curious, and you don’t have to answer, of course, but was it Townes?” 

“Benny,” she groans. “You are absolutely _awful_ at pillow talk.” 

“Yeah,” he admits. “That sounds about right. I guess talking about chess before probably wasn’t particularly endearing either.” 

"No,” she agrees. “Although in retrospect perhaps it’s become more so, as an essential part of your character. But no, to answer your question, definitely not Townes.” 

“Ah,” he says. “Good.” 

_Okay,_ she thinks to herself. _You could just tell him! Right now! You could just say, “Actually, it was Borgov,” and then it will be done and he said it was all fine, and then you wouldn’t feel like it’s a secret you can’t tell. Unless, of course, he wants nothing more to do with you, and decides you’ve betrayed your country and your moral standing, and . . ._

So instead, what she says is, “Why is that good?” 

"Well, for one, I would feel like a dunce if I helped coordinate him going to Moscow in that case. And besides, well, I feel like he’s kind of tough to compete with.” 

“For what it’s worth, I’m sure you would have no problem competing with him on a chess board. And, you know, probably other things too.” 

He gives her a lopsided smile. “Thanks, I’m honored.” His tone is dry, but he leans in to kiss her anyway. 

* * *

The next few days pass in a haze. They traverse the streets of New York, eventually making it to Fifth Avenue, where Benny dutifully heavily compliments Beth on every dress she tries on. They go to the Met, and (to Benny’s chagrin) Time Square, and walk around and gawk at the buildings on the Upper East Side, and take the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty. 

They continue their cooking escapades, and, after having exhausted their collective knowledge, they buy a number of cookbooks at The Strand. 

And they play chess. Not with any real intent (neither of them, as it turns out, have any tournaments lined up, at least in the next month or two), but just for the joy of playing. Beth wins more than she loses, which Benny is a good sport about, but she still loses sometimes too, and finds it doesn’t bother her even a fraction of what it once would have. 

Some days, they bring pieces out and play at the chess tables in Central Park. They’re very rarely _recognized_ , but sometimes they decide to show off with a bit of speed chess, and acquire a crowd around them like magnets.

But today, they’re just playing in Benny’s apartment, on a languid late afternoon after exploring the city, killing time before dinner. Beth has just set up the pieces and Benny comes to sit across from her. 

“An idea,” he offers. “Do you want to play through any of the games from the Moscow tournament?” 

They haven’t really done anything much in the way of true chess studying since she’s been back, and she actually hasn’t had a chance to review most of the games from the tournament. 

“Sure,” she says. “You can pick.” 

They play through her game against Luchenko, and she recounts the words he spoke to her at the end of the game. 

“Have you played him?” she asks, realizing they’ve never much discussed him before. 

“Once,” he replies. “It was an interesting game, though he certainly didn’t say anything quite so fawning to me.” 

She gives him a mock sympathetic look, and they continue through the moves. As fun as their casual games (as casual as any competition between them can really be, which is to say not all that much) have been, she realizes she’s missed this sort of level of analysis applied to moves. 

They end up just reheating the eggplant parmesan they’d made the night before rather than tearing themselves away from their study, and once they finish, Benny stretches his hands behind his back and says, “Want to go through the game against Borgov? I know we’ve both analyzed the part before the adjournment to death, so we can breeze through that part mostly, but we never really got to compare notes on it.” 

She can’t think of a reasonable justification not to, other than the obvious discomfort on her side, but she _has_ been enjoying herself, so she nods. “Sure.” 

They’re really only a few moves in, Benny echoing the paths of the pieces Borgov had played across from her not that much more than a month ago, when Benny slides his bishop along its predetermined path and says, “Okay, so I think he was trying to pin your knight here, right?” 

She shakes her head, and leans forward, moving the pieces to demonstrate. “No, he was trying to set up a fork, two moves down. I didn’t see it at the time, I only got out of it by accident, really.” 

Benny nods appreciatively. “Nice, how did you figure that one out?” 

Well, actually, she hadn’t figured that one out. She’s sure she would have, eventually, but what actually happened was - 

“He told me.” 

Benny’s head jerks up. “He? He, being Borgov?” 

She’s not sure if she just didn’t think it through, or if she was tired of worrying about keeping it secret and blurted it out intentionally at some subconscious level, but at this point she has no choice but to nod. 

“He just _told you_? Why?” 

“We went through the game together, after. While I was in Moscow a few extra days.” 

She can practically see the gears whirring in his head, and she can definitely see the moment everything snaps into place in his mind. 

“Beth,” he says, slowly and cautiously. “When you said you’d been involved with other people since we fought, was one of them Borgov?” 

She makes herself meet his eyes, and nods. 

“Okay,” he says, still speaking in the same unnervingly, exaggeratedly calm voice. “I said before that it didn’t matter to me. And I meant it, and still do. But, I guess I want to know, did it mean anything? With him?” 

She sighs. “Well, it didn’t mean _nothing_. But we both knew all along it wasn’t going to be anything with any durability, and that it wasn’t going to happen again.” 

“‘What happens in Moscow, stays in Moscow’?” Benny asks, almost disbelievingly. 

“Yeah, more or less, I guess.” 

“And if you could -” His voice has started to take on emotion, breaking his layer of calm, so he stops himself, and reformulates, asking simply, “Do you love him?” 

_Do I love him?_ she thinks. She remembers walking through Red Square, and Gorky Park, and lazily playing games of chess, wrapped in bedsheets in an upscale Moscow hotel room. And then she thinks about the last week, here with Benny. Not even so much all the places they’ve been, but the quiet nights they’ve spent cooking and talking, and just being themselves. 

“No,” she says, and she realizes only as she says it that it’s true. “It was _meaningful_. But I don’t think it was _love_.” 

He breathes out, with something she thinks is relief. “And was there anyone else who was meaningful?” 

She shakes her head. “The only other person was one of the chess players I met in that cafe in Egypt. We saw each other a couple times but it wasn’t - it didn’t really mean anything.” She pauses. “You know, he’s kind of part of the reason I’m here.” 

“How so?” 

“I think he could tell that there was someone else, and so he asked me about it. And, well, the reason I wanted to travel was I just wanted to feel free, unbound. I was worried that you wouldn’t want me to contact you, but I also just, didn’t know how to feel. Everything has been so intense the past few months, and I was worried that if we met again I wouldn’t know what to say, or I’d mess it up, or that I wasn’t ready yet. And I told him - well, I definitely didn’t tell him all of it, but I told him some of it. And he said to me that you wouldn’t wait forever. Which I already knew, of course. But it sort of reinforced it for me, I guess? And it made me realize that I didn’t want to wait forever either.” 

“Beth,” he breathes, dropping his facade of serenity, and pivots to her side of the table to crush her against him in a hug. “I don’t know what to say, there’s just been so much that’s happened, hasn’t there?” 

She nods. 

“But you’re here now,” he says. 

“Yes,” she replies. “I’m here now.” 

He breathes in as though he is about to speak then pauses, clearly with something on the tip of his tongue, deliberating what to say. Finally, “Well, I’ve wanted to ask but haven’t known how, but I guess now is as good a time as any. How long are you planning to stay?” 

“I do have to check in on the house in Kentucky eventually,” she says. 

“And then?” he asks. 

“Are you offering?” she asks bluntly. “For me to stay here?” 

“Yeah,” he says. “Look, it doesn’t have to be formal or anything, that you officially live here or anything, if that’s not what you want. But just, you’re always welcome to stay here as long as you’d like.” 

It’s a clever loophole he’s devised - it certainly seems too soon for them to contemplate living together on a permanent basis, which is more or less what he’s describing. But she’d still have her house in Kentucky, in case anything went wrong, and she’d go there sometimes anyway. And she thinks about the last week, and imagines the future days like that stretching on into eternity. 

“Okay,” she says. “That sounds good to me.” 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Endings, middles, and beginnings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for a bit of a delay in getting this last installment out - real life decided to rear its ugly head and remind me that I have actual obligations, but it's here now!
> 
> I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what the travel situation would be to go to Canada from the USSR in this era and I found... nothing (for reference, the Wikipedia article on "Canada-Soviet Relations" begins "Canada–Soviet Union relations were the relations between Canada and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union)" which was... informative). So I kind of just decided to go with it, but if anyone happens to know anything about this topic, I'm now incredibly curious.
> 
> And finally, as always, many many thanks to Tanya, for gently checking in on me to make sure this actually got written, and for her editing, support, and just general kindness.

_Vancouver, Canada_

_Eight Months Later_

Their flight from New York gets in at 9 P.M. local time, but for Beth and Benny it feels like midnight, and they still have to take a taxi to the hotel. They’d spent the plane ride over practicing for the tournament on a mini travel chess set balanced precariously on their tray tables.

But Beth’s tired now, so she leans her head onto Benny’s shoulder in the back seat of the taxi. He disentangles his arm from under her, and cards his fingers through her hair. “Do you want to do anything to get out tomorrow before the tournament? Or do you want to just stay in and practice?”

“Hm?” she replies sleepily. “Oh, I guess mostly practice, but it would be good not to be trapped in the hotel the whole time. But I guess I was thinking we’d do most of the sight-seeing after the tournament.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured. How do you feel?”

“Tired,” she answers, though she realizes that’s not really what he’s asking.

He gives her a look, and doesn’t press, but Beth decides it’s probably in her best interest to answer the real question anyway.

“It’s nice to be outside of America again. I just hope I haven’t gotten rusty, playing only domestic tournaments.”

“What, playing against me isn’t enough of a challenge for you?” he asks, but his words are paired with a fond tone and her favorite lopsided smile, so she knows he doesn’t really mean anything by it.

 _He really has been amazingly supportive about all this,_ she thinks. 

When she’d beaten him in the last round of the U.S. Championship to retain her reigning title, he’d been, outwardly at least, completely fine with it, and had thrown himself into helping her prepare for the string of upcoming international tournaments, just as he had a year ago.

It had been weird playing against him in a real tournament again, after she’d come to know how he thought almost as well as she understood her own strategy, through countless games on the floor of his apartment. At the tournament, they’d decided to stay in separate hotel rooms up until they played each other, in the hopes of maintaining some semblance of competitive distance, but after the last game had finished, both ended up back in Beth’s hotel room without even needing to discuss it.

So she doesn’t feel the need to reply with anything other than a teasing, “You’re always a challenge for me.” 

He gives her a half-hearted eye roll, and just lets her rest against his shoulder until they make it to the hotel.

The hotel is luxurious, as always for these types of things, although much less sleek and glamorous and much more charming and perhaps even grandiose - there is something distinctly British or Old World about it. 

The bellhop carries their bags from the trunk of the taxi to the gold-colored luggage trolley, and Beth elbows Benny. “You’ve been put out of a job,” she says. 

“I know,” he replies, drawing his eyebrows together into a look of mock concern. “Now that you have someone else to carry your bags, do you still even want me around?”

By way of answer, she links her fingers through his and follows him into the lobby, which is just as grand and imposing as the outside of the building foretold, and heads towards the concierge’s desk. 

There’s one family ahead of them at the counter to check-in, and Beth is too tired to think anything of it until they finish checking in and turn around.

Borgov looks as surprised to see her as she feels, but he quickly schools his expression into something like impassivity. “Beth Harmon,” he says, in a perfectly neutral tone. “Good to see you again.”

It’s not as though she hadn’t known he was going to be there. She certainly had, and she intended that their match this week would have the same outcome as their last one (or at least, their last formal once, she’s not sure she remembers who had won the last time they’d actually played).

But beyond the extensive studying and practice for the tournament, including for a game against him, she and Benny haven’t really talked about it. The closest they’d come was one night a couple weeks before, when they were going through one of his games at the international level from a few years before she’d come on the scene.

“Is it going to be weird for you?” Benny had asked.

Despite the vagueness of the question, she hadn’t had to probe for clarification to know what he was talking about. “I don’t know, maybe. I guess I’ll see.” 

He’d nodded, and seemed to accept this, but before they could move on, she’d asked, “Is it going to be weird for _you_?”

He looked at her wryly, and echoed her. “I don’t know, I guess I’ll see.”

As it turns out, now that they get the opportunity to see, yes, it is a bit weird. But nothing that she can’t handle. She feels Benny’s hold on her hand tighten slightly, bringing her back to herself, and she realizes they are still holding hands. 

She nods to Borgov. “Good to see you as well. Good luck this week.”

“You too,” he says, and then he and his family are gone, headed towards the elevators.

She lets out a breath, and turns back to Benny. “Shall we check in?”

* * *

Their first full day in Vancouver, they spend most of their time in the hotel room, practicing and re-practicing for Beth’s matches the next day. Given the way the schedule looks like it’s been worked out, she’s expecting to play Georgi Girev either late the next day, or early on the second day of the three day tournament, so she’s focused a lot of her practice on him. She’s certain he will have gotten better since the last time they’ve played, but then again, she thinks that she has too.

She tells Benny about their encounter in Mexico City, and he laughs. “No one who plays chess against you can help falling in love with you, it seems,” he remarks.

She smiles at the compliment, but starts for a moment at the implication. She knows he doesn’t mean it literally, but still - Benny has told her he loves her exactly once, a couple months ago when he thought she was asleep, and she didn’t have the courage to reveal that she was really awake. He hasn’t repeated it since, and while she’s certain that he hadn’t meant anything by the comment about Georgi, she sort of wishes he had. She knows she should tell him properly, but old habits die hard.

When her mind starts going off in circles like this, on trails far away from its intended subject of focus of chess, she knows she needs to get out of the hotel room. From her position on the bed, she stretches her arms out to her toes, and then suggests, “Should we go out for a walk?”

“Oh thank God,” Benny says. “I thought I was going to go crazy.”

“You should have said something,” she admonishes. 

He shrugs. “You seemed pretty locked in, I didn’t want to interrupt.”

It’s touching, but she also doesn’t want him making himself miserable on her behalf, if only because there’s a fifty percent chance it’ll mean he ends up being unintentionally whiny later. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go.”

They leave the hotel and blink their eyes to adjust to the newness of natural light. It’s late afternoon edging towards evening, and they stroll the streets and duck into shops with hand-made crafts and cozy sweaters. They stroll through the mall as well, and Beth is tempted by many things in the Hudson Bay Company, but restrains herself. 

Before she realizes, it’s gotten dark, and they get dinner in a charming little dimly-lit seafood restaurant. She orders salmon, which is excellent, and she points out to Benny, “The smoked salmon here in Canada is almost certainly better than New York.”

“I refuse to believe it,” he replies.

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to try it to find out.”

“What do you think of it here?” he asks. 

“Aside from the salmon?”

“Aside from the salmon, yeah. I mean, as the expert traveller and all, I want your opinion.”

She smiles. “It certainly feels more like American than the other places I visited. America with better fish, more British-style buildings, and it just feels a little… sparklier?” 

“I think everything feels sparklier when you’re travelling. Just the newness of it.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I’m glad we got out. I mean, I feel a little guilty about taking the evening off, but it’s nice to actually see the city we’re in.”

“Me too. And don’t feel guilty - we both needed to get out of that room.”

“You? Benny Watts? Saying there are things more important than playing chess?” she says, playing at being aghast.

“Not at all,” he says smoothly. “I’m saying the best way for you to succeed this week was to get out tonight.”

She knows he’s right, and she knows he knows that, so there’s no need to tell him. But it’s settling, to know that he can read her impulses that well. She just hopes they were both right, and taking the night off won’t turn out to have been a mistake.

* * *

Two days in, thus far, it hasn’t been. She sailed through her first rounds, two against players she’d beaten before and one against a French player she hadn’t previously played, and for whom she and Benny had run into trouble trying to find many of his previous games to study before the tournament, but she eventually had him backed into a corner. Her second day had capped off with another relatively easy victory, and while her match against Girev had been challenging, in a deeply fulfilling way, ultimately it had ended the same as their first one.

The look in his slightly older eyes as they shook hands at the end of the game had promised to her that someday the shoe would be on the other foot, but she figures that’ll be a problem for another day.

As she wraps up their game, after she accepts his congratulations, she then accepts that of the onlookers that have gathered, and seeks out Benny’s eyes in the crowd. She’s not averse to the adoration of the people watching, but she finds that, in her mind, the importance of his approval far surpasses that of the crowd.

After the minimum amount of time required not to be impolite, she makes her way to him.

“Nicely played,” he remarks. “You had nothing to worry about.”

“Thanks, though I certainly felt like I did while I was playing.”

“Then it must have felt much more intense than it looked, because I was certain you had him most of the game.”

“And of course,” she teases, “you’re completely unbiased.”

“I call them as I see them, naturally. Anyway, do you want to go back up to the room and study for tomorrow’s game? Or do you want to get out?”

“Maybe a quick cup of coffee first, but then let's go back to the room.”

They’re making their way to the lobby to visit the cafe next door that has become a regular haunt for them the past couple days when they notice a crowd gathered.

“Is that Borgov’s game?” Benny asks. “I would have thought it would be over by now.”

Technically, the identity of who Beth will be playing tomorrow is up in the air pending the conclusion of this game. But no one really had any doubt about whether Borgov would beat his opponent, a relative newcomer on the scene from East Germany, who had been putting together solid but not awe-inspiring games at the tournament. 

Right as Benny comments, the group breaks into the polite applause that signals the end of a match, and Beth sees Borgov’s opponent stand and offer his hand in concession. 

They shake hands, and then Borgov’s eyes scan the crowd. Beth can feel the exact moment he notices her and Benny standing there. For a moment, she feels embarrassed to be caught, but he gives a nod in her direction. Surprised, she nods back, and stands for a moment, suddenly unsure of herself, before shaking her head slightly to clear it, and turning back to Benny. “Coffee?”

* * *

She and Benny have just wrapped up another walk-through of one of Borgov’s games that, between the two of them, they have to have played through at least three or four times prior to this evening, when Benny fixes her with a look and says, “Okay, I don’t think we can live on coffee alone. I can run out and grab something for dinner so you can keep going, but we should eat. Or we could order room service again, I guess.”

She glances up, and is surprised to see that the world outside the windows is now dark. She pulls her arms behind her back to stretch. “I could use a break, let’s both go down. I saw a diner-type place down the street, that should be quick.” 

They bundle up in coats and head outside, Beth filling her lungs with a deep breath of the crisp air. They’d passed the diner their first night out exploring, and it’s only a couple blocks away, but on their way there, Beth is waylaid when they pass a souvenir shop. 

“I’m going to run in here,” Beth says. “I keep meaning to buy postcards for Jolene and Mackenzie, and keep forgetting.” Beth had toyed with the idea of trying to meet up with Mackenzie while in Canada, before internalizing the fact that Toronto and Vancouver being in the same country didn’t mean they were actually _close_.

“I don’t think you’re _forgetting_ ,” Benny says. “I think you’re just very busy. Do you want to meet at the diner or back at the hotel?”

“Hm, the hotel I guess? I’ll just have a burger or something, whatever you’re having.” 

He kisses her on the forehead, as though they are dramatically parting, and he trudges on down the street through the cold, while she turns into the shop. 

She ends up getting caught up chatting with the store owner for a bit - he’d asked Beth what she was doing in town, and, as it transpires, his son turns out to be an aspiring chess player himself, so he asks Beth for an autograph to bring home to hm. 

Eventually, she figures Benny will be coming back with the food soon so she disentangles herself from the conversation and heads back towards the hotel. 

It’s as she’s stepping into the lobby, mind on one of Girev’s plays from earlier, gaming out different scenarios, that she almost literally runs into Borgov.

“Beth!” he says, surprised, and reaches out a hand to steady her arm.

He seems to catch himself, then, and quickly removes his hand, bringing his arms to rest stiffly by his sides.

“How have you been?” she asks, hoping to dispel some of the awkwardness.

It seems to work, he smiles and replies, slipping back into Russian, the way they used to speak when she was in Moscow. “I’ve been well, though I have to say the past few international tournaments have been less interesting without you there. Georgi has been biting back his frustration ever since you finished your match.”

“It was a tough game,” she says humbly.

“Indeed,” he replies, drily. “The humility of one who knows there’s no need for it. 

“A feeling I’m sure you’re entirely unaccustomed to.”

“Well, I don’t think there’s any need to tell you how I learned how to recognize it.”

They fall silent for a moment, and Beth is about to make her excuses and head for her room and wait for Benny to arrive, when Borgov picks up the conversational thread. “And how have _you_ been? I see your absence from international tournaments hasn’t seemed to have too many adverse impacts on your play.”

“I travelled for a bit, after I left Moscow,” she explains. “And then I was just focused on domestic tournaments for a bit.”

“You’re back in Kentucky now?” he asks.

She’s somewhat flattered that he remembered the location of her home. But, “No, actually, I’ve been living in New York for a while.” 

“Ah,” he says. “With Benny Watts?”

She nods, not particularly wanting to engage in a line of conservation that she believes can only result in intense awkwardness.

“I’ve played him before you know, before you unseated him as US Champion. He’s very talented of course, but not as good as you.”

“Maybe not quite as good in chess,” she hedges. “But certainly in many other things.”

He gives her a look that she can only describe as fond. “And are you happy?”

“Yeah,” she replies. “Yeah, I am.”

“Good,” he says, with an intensity somewhat at odds with their location in the middle of a hotel lobby. “You know that’s all I -”

It is at this moment that they notice Benny walking in through the doors of the hotel, and he freezes only a few feet away, noticing them in turn.

A noticeable transformation comes over Borgov’s face, and he is once more the inscrutable competitor, unsticking his hands from his sides and folding them behind his back as Benny unfreezes and approaches. 

“Miss Harmon,” he says, speaking in English once again, his voice perfectly bland, “It was nice catching up, and I look forward to our game tomorrow.”

There’s no need for subterfuge with Benny, of course, but he has no way of knowing that, and it’s disconcerting how well he does at switching into playing the part. 

She tries to match his tone, though she’s not sure what the point is. “You as well.”

He nods, and then sweeps away towards the elevators, leaving her alone with Benny. She is troubled to find that for the first time in a very long time, his face is completely unreadable to her. 

She wants to tell him that there’s nothing to worry about, that nothing happened, but doing so would acknowledge that he might have thought there was something to worry about, that in theory, something could have happened, and that thought is painful in its own way. 

“Benny?” she prompts.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice flat but not particularly antagonistic. “Let’s go back to the hotel and eat.” 

He doesn’t bring it up when they get back to the hotel room, but he’s quiet over dinner, and halfway through eating, Beth suggests they start the next practice game just to grant herself a reprieve from the overbearing silence.

He agrees, and sets up the board for another of Borgov’s past games. They don’t play in silence, of course. The whole point of playing through games like this is to analyze moves, but his tone is decidedly subdued, and his words are clipped.

The boiling point comes when Beth, holding the bishop she’s about to move in her hand hovering over the board, sighs and says, “I just don’t think I really understand what he was doing with this move. The bishop wasn’t under threat - why move it backward and give up control of the board this early in the game?”

Instead of an insightful reply, or even an attempt at one, Benny only bites out, “I’m not sure why you’re asking me, you clearly know him much better than I do.”

Her grip loosens, and the bishop clatters onto the board, knocking into a couple pawns on its way down.

“Benny,” she says, a note of warning danger in her voice. “If you have something you want to say, say it.”

He looks at her, as though contemplating whether that is in fact a good idea. She doubts he actually came to the conclusion it was one, but he ploughs ahead anyway. “Look, I don’t care that you’ve slept with him. It’s a little weird for me to think about sure, but whatever. But what I care about is the meaningful stares, and the secret rendez-vous and - ”

“That was not a secret rendez-vous!” Beth exclaims. “Honestly, what on earth would make you think that? It was in the middle of a hotel lobby, for one thing, and it was us awkwardly bumping into each other and making polite conversation.”

“Yes,” Benny says icily. “It definitely looked like you were just making police conversation, what with the way neither of you seemed aware of anything in the world around you except each other.”

“It wasn’t like that! God, do you really have so little faith in me as to think that?”

He sighs and tucks his hair behind his ear, so that when he speaks again it sounds much more calm, though still pained. “It’s not that I think something’s going to happen. I _don’t_ think you’d do that to me. It’s just that, I see you together, and I think really, where’s the difference? Between how you are with him and how you are with me? I mean honestly, sometimes I can’t help but think that some day in the not too distant future, someone will ask you, ‘Benny Watts, what happened between you and him?’ and you’ll look very pensive, and say with all your wisdom, ‘Well, it was meaningful, but it wasn’t love.’”

She feels like she’s been slapped. _But it is love,_ a part of her wants to say. And she knows it’s the truth - she loves Benny. And she thinks if she said it now, the painful part of this conversation would be over. But she doesn’t want this to be the moment where she tells him - that if she does, she will always feel a little like she was goaded into it, like she said it because she thought she had to. And that perhaps a part of him will always wonder if she meant it, or if she said it so he wouldn’t leave.

So she tries to make him understand another way. “It was a fantasy, Benny! What happened between Borgov and I, that’s all it was, it was a fantasy. A wonderful five days that is, of course, wrapped in the pleasant fog all good memories have, but nothing more than that. What we have, it’s real. Of course it’s rougher, because that’s what reality is. But that’s also why it can _last_.”

“But how do I know that?” he asks, his voice choked. “How do I know this too isn’t just a fantasy for you? God Beth, it’s been what, 8 or 9 months and we still technically don’t even live together.”

“Wait, is _that_ what this is about? I’m fine with us saying we live together, it’s the truth, regardless of whatever technicalities we came up with.”

“No, that’s not what it’s about! I don’t know, maybe partly? It is and it isn’t, it’s not really about that but it’s a part of the broader whole. I don’t know Beth, I just don’t.” He’s worked up, but suddenly his shoulders droop and all the fight seems to drain from him. “I know this isn’t helping you for tomorrow. I’m sorry. I think maybe you should go back to studying and I think I shouldn’t be here right now. For both of our sakes.”

“Okay,” she says, in a small voice, and then he’s out the door, grabbing only his wallet. 

For a second, she considers crying. But she reminds herself it is horridly inefficient - if she cries right now, and doesn’t study, it’ll make it more likely she loses tomorrow, and then she’ll end up crying all over again. Best to suppress it now, and then she can cry for both reasons tomorrow, if she has to.

As contrived as the logic is, it sates her, and she returns to staring at the board, retreating to the familiar comfort of chess against everything about the world that has gone twisted tonight. 

At eleven o’clock, Benny still hasn’t come back, and she decides she should try going to bed, if she has any shot at salvaging the game tomorrow. She thinks there’s no way she’ll actually be able to fall asleep, but blessedly, she is able to drift off almost right away. 

A couple hours later, she is awakened by the loud jangling of the door opening and closing, and as she is startled awake and tries to orient herself to her surroundings, she becomes aware of an all too familiar scent which she has fortunately not had cause to encounter recently - Benny smells like cheap booze.

In the dim light of the room, she sees him stumbling towards the couch, clearly trying to avoid making noise, but not being particularly successful in that task.

“Benny,” she says, quietly. She means to tell him that he can sleep in the bed too, it’s fine, but before she can, he turns to look at her with a guilty expression.

“Shit,” he says, tiredly. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“It’s okay,” she says, because it is. She’s just relieved he’s back. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch, you know.”

He waives his hand sloppily. “‘s fine. Can sleep here. Go back to sleep.”

She looks at him worriedly, but within minutes he himself has passed out on the couch, and eventually she nods off again too.

* * *

Beth jolts awake from the sound of the alarm she had set the night before. She hears groaning noises from the direction of the couch, but as soon as she turns off the alarm they cease, and Benny seems to fall right back asleep without ever having been fully conscious in the first place.

Not that she can blame him, given the night it seems like he had. 

She goes about getting dressed, and then before she leaves, she sets a glass of water and acetaminophen on the table by where Benny is asleep.

He blinks his eyes open. “What time is it?” he asks, voice rough from some combination of sleep and his activities the night before.

“Nine,” she replies. 

“Are you leaving now? I thought the game didn’t start until eleven?”

She shrugs. “I thought I’d run out for coffee and food and make sure I had time to get back early. Do you want anything?” 

It feels intensely weird to her to be having this conversation, a weird mirror of the conversations they have every morning, as though things are perfectly normal and they haven’t fought.

“Nah,” he says. “I’m okay, I don’t need to get there as early as you do, I’ll go out later.”

They fall into silence, and Beth tentatively broaches the topic that had to this point been verboten. “Should we talk?”

Benny gives her a serious look. “Is that a good idea? You don’t want to be distracted right before the game starts.”

Beth privately thinks she will be far more distracted if they don’t talk, and she has the conversation hanging over her, than if they do, even if it’s an intense conversation, but she doesn’t say so.

“Okay,” she agrees. “After, then.”

Benny nods, and reaches over to squeeze her hand. “You’re gonna be fine. Great, in fact.”

She hopes he means that they will be too.

* * *

She recalls that once, in the midst of their time together in Moscow, Beth had reflected on how unsettling it might be when she had to play Borgov competitively again. How odd it would be, to look across the table at someone, under the eyes of hundreds of spectators, and pretend they’ve never played each other while lazing in bed.

She doesn’t think the audience is able to tell anything - Borgov plays his character far too well for that, aside from a slight smile when they shake hands that she’s certain no one there (save Benny) will have any reason to read anything into, and she’s put on her game face.

It’s challenging in a far different way from playing Benny at tournaments. The problem with playing Benny is that they know everything about each other, taught each other half of each of their best moves, and know how the other one thinks like the back of their hands. It’s like trying to outsmart yourself.

The problem of playing Borgov is of an entirely different variety. It’s not that she knows everything - it’s that she knows just a bit more than she should, and just enough to know how much she doesn’t know. 

But she finds, as they settle into their opening moves, that the harder problem for her is not trying not to think about her relationship with Borgov, it’s trying not to think about Benny. Trying not to think about what they’ll say to each other after this game, trying not to think of all the ways that don’t involve chess that he might be analyzing her and Borgov’s moves.

In her discombobulated state, she makes a mistake early, losing a rook in a trap that was way too obvious to fall for. Borgov looks up at her in surprise, clearly not actually expecting his series of moves to work, and she tells herself she needs to calm down.

Perhaps it’s the fact that Borgov had looked surprised that had helped - it was in its own way a compliment. She knows she no longer needs to prove herself to him, or really anyone, they knew what kind of a player she was.

And so she is able to focus. Losing her rook like that isn’t ideal, but it’s hardly the kind of thing she can’t come back from, if she tightens her play. 

And she does. The game is, as it always would be between them, long and grueling, but even before Borgov is shaking his head and tipping over his king, she has a good idea of where things will go. 

He doesn’t do anything so dramatic as hand her his king or hug her as he had before - innocence had given them permission that guilt could not. 

But as he offers her his hand to shake, with that achingly familiar wry smile, he remarks in low-voiced Russian, “I suppose they might accurately call me washed up now. Once can be a fluke, but twice . . .”

“I think all in all, we’re still about even,” she reminds him.

“Not for much longer, I’m sure,” he comments. “But congratulations, again.”

This is the last thing they say to each other before she is swept away by well-wishers and the press, wanting to know how it feels to have beaten Borgov again (“Gratifying, I suppose”), whether she thinks she can call herself the best chess player in the world (“I’ll leave it to others”), and what her plans are now (“Same as they always are, more chess”). 

Fortunately, they don’t ask about her relationship with Benny - she’s sure they’ve noticed, but most of the regular chess writers are respectful enough not to pry. It’s the magazine writers that will pose the real problem - she tries to avoid them as much as possible, these days.

When she finally disentangles herself from the mob, she sets off to find Benny. She knows he had been there for the match, as she’d seen him in the crowd as she first sat down, but she hasn’t seen him since the game was over.

She figures he’s gone back to their room, and is heading towards the elevators through the lobby, but as she passes the hotel bar she hears his familiar voice call her name.

She spins around, and is greeted with an unexpected sight - Benny and Borgov tucked away in one of the bar’s booths, seated across from each other. They don’t look like they’ve been about to come to blows, so she figures it’s safe to go over, and slides into the booth next to Benny.

Despite the fact that it’s barely evening, they both seem like they’ve been drinking, but no more than a drink or too at most, and the atmosphere between them is surprisingly comfortable, casual. 

Borgov breaks the silence. “If you don’t mind assuaging my curiosity, did you let me take the rook?”

“What?” Beth says. “No, not at all. No grand strategy there - that was entirely a mistake on my part.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I thought, but when I took it I couldn’t help thinking there was something I was missing.”

“Perhaps I should mess up more often,” Beth jokes. “Maybe it knocked you off your game.”

The three of them laugh, and it’s comfortable enough, and Borgov stays just long enough to be polite, chatting about the other games at the tournament, before making his excuses and standing up from the table.

“I’m sure we’ll be running into each other again before too long,” he says, by way of farewell. He shakes Benny’s hand, and, now that they are away from prying eyes, gives Beth a light hug, and then he is gone.

Beth sneaks a look at Benny, but he doesn’t seem upset by the display, to her relief.

“How did _that_ happen?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Ran into him in the lobby. Seemed like the polite thing.”

She’s willing to bet there’s more to it than that, but she doesn’t press on that particular point. “What were you two talking about before I got here?”

“The Bolshoi Ballet,” he says, deadpan. 

“Really?” she asks, incredulously. Borgov being knowledgeable about ballet does not seem particularly incongruous, but she’s quite surprised that Benny would take any interest in it.

“No, of course not,” Benny chuckles. “We were talking about you.”

“Oh,” she replies, surprised, though of course she really shouldn’t be. “Anything of note?”

“Not really. It was a surprisingly pleasant conversation, though.”

The whole thing has more than a hint of surreality, and Beth is still formulating a response, when he cuts through her thoughts.

“Beth, I want to apologize about yesterday. I clearly overreacted, and I’m sorry - not that it was okay at any point, but I know it was the last thing you needed last night in particular.”

 _Wait,_ she wonders. _This whole having a drink with Borgov thing, was this Benny’s form of doing_ penance _?_

She decides it doesn’t really matter - the important thing is that not everything is ruined. 

Gently, she reaches under the table to take his hand, and pulls it onto the surface of the table so their hands rest together. “It’s okay,” she says. “I know it’s been a stressful couple of days for you too, and you’ve been amazingly supportive this whole time. And while, yes, I was hurt by the things you said, I know I’m not always the most . . . open, and I can understand why you drew the conclusions you did.”

He seems to understand what she’s trying to imply, and replies, “You know you don’t owe me anything, right? I mean, I suppose, beyond the basic things and decency we owe to each other by the fact that we’re in a relationship. But you never have to say. . . anything. . . that you don’t want to.”

There is, Beth speculates, no perfect time to tell someone you love them. But she’s been to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and watched the sun set over the pyramids, and enjoyed perfect evenings in Florentine piazzas, and dined at restaurant in New York where the menu prices made her shudder, and she can’t think of any moment more perfect than this - in a forgettable hotel bar in Vancouver, Canada.

She takes her free hand and uses it to tuck a lock of Benny’s hair behind his ear, as she had done once, so very long ago. 

“Benny, I love you.”

She watches the emotions as they flit across his face - surprise, then wonder and awe, and then pure, undiluted happiness.

“I love you, too,” he replies, almost breathlessly, and then he’s pulling her towards him, and they’re kissing, perhaps a little more passionately than is ideal for their location. 

They both seem to realize this at the same time, and Benny throws what is certainly a very generous tip for the bartender on the table, and they pull each other towards the elevators, entirely oblivious to anything in their field of view but each other. 

She barely knows how they make it back to their room, but they do, prying off their shoes and collapsing on the bed. Beth is caught between the urgency of desperation and the desire to savor each moment, and she can see the same dilemma playing out across Benny’s face.

He pulls back from her slightly and gazes at her for a moment, and when he leans back to kiss her again, it’s much more slowly and tenderly. He tugs at her shirt to untuck it from her skirt, but instead of removing it, only traces his hand under it, along her back. 

He pulls away from her again, though his hand stays in the same place. “What is it?” she asks.

“Just. . . You love me.”

She grins. “Yeah.”

“And I love you.”

“Well, I hope so,” she teases.

And then they’re suddenly both laughing, delirious from delight and from each other, and this time when Benny kisses her again he doesn’t draw away.

Beth is always amazed, every time they’re together like this, how being with him always manages to feel both familiar and new. But as they slide their clothes off and she pulls him back to her, she thinks she has never felt just like this before: this surety, this - love. She feels so loved.

And when they are done, as they curl together like magnets and Benny presses repeated light kisses to the top of her shoulder, as she catches her breath, she feels like she is glowing.

They don’t speak for a while, aside from occasional reaffirmations of their love, luxuriating in the feelings surrounding them. 

Finally, Benny breaks the silence. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

She thinks about all the things she wants to do in Vancouver - Granville Island, Stanley Park, tea at the Empress (she brought a dress just for that specific purpose). 

She describes her grand visions to Benny, and she knows they’ll actually do these things - as many or as few as she likes, and it will be so much the better for doing them with Benny.

But she also thinks about the dingy apartment in New York (and really, now that they seem to have acknowledged that they’re actually, officially, living together perhaps they should look into a place that actually has a modicum of natural light - between the two of them they can definitely afford it, but it seems she’s grown sentimental and attached) and realizes - of all the places she’s been, there’s no place that can compare.

“Benny,” she admits. “I can’t wait to go home.”


End file.
